He closed the door behind him, head down. Unwrapped his scarf and hung his coat on the hook. I asked how his lab was, and his dejected “okay” was all I expected. Over lunch he’d asked if we could eat alone, not with the usual friends because he had midsemester blues, pile upon pile of miscellany to worry about. I’d agreed and complained about my brit lit test.
I gave him a sentimental smile as he came into my room that evening and motioned from him to join me on the bed. He just needed to lie down and take a deep breath. I’d rub his head and the stress would simmer away. He’d be back to the same old Clayton in a bit.
When I laid back to cuddle, he buried his head in my neck. I let my hand trail up and down his back, silently and stony face. It was getting him; I could tell. This wasn’t the usual R and R after a long day of classes. There was a weight to the air, to Clayton. I realized I was clenching my teeth again. “I love you,” he said ardently, a hint of a crack to his voice as he buried himself into me.
“I love you, too,” came my taken aback response. I didn’t know what had brought that on. He’d said with the tone of a solider leaving for battle or suicide bomber about to take flight.
Five minutes or so passed with nothing more said. He laid back and stared at the ceiling. I moved in close.
“You know Conner? Sam’s Conner?”
My breath froze upon his neck. His voice was breaking and red lines wove spiderwebs in the whites of his eyes.
“Milwaukee Conner?”
I knew him; we’d stayed in his house over break. He lived with Clayton’s high school best friend and another sophomore at UWM. He showed me a picture on his phone of a silverfish he killed at his work, which was apparently teeming with them. I’d cringed. He talked to Mike Mathias about going to the gym the next day. He was working a night shift at a hotel the night we were over and couldn’t come out with us.
“Yeah.” Clayton’s eyes didn’t leave the ceiling. “He’s dead.”
With this, he bit his lip as his eyes distorted behind a well of silent tears. Something kicked me in the throat. I trembled from somewhere deep inside my stomach, clinging to his sweater, staring up from the shoulder I descended into.
“What?” I finally managed meekly. “How?”
“I’m not sure, I didn’t get the whole story. I think he drowned.”
My limbs were rigid, molded plastic frozen in place. The hatch on my throat slid closed. I felt tears stream from my cheeks, but couldn’t make a sound.
Clayton’s voice quivered. He clung to me. “He was my age. Our age.” He could barely bring himself to talk. “What if it had been Sam? Or you?”
I dissolved into the bed, morphed into his shoulder. Became a spilled mess of flesh and saltwater. ‘Dead’ is a word with a heavy past; dead is a word of implications. Dead is a word for presidents and celebrities and grandparents. Dead isn’t a word for a college kid I drank a beer with in January.
‘Dead’ isn’t a word you use for kids, not seriously. Dead is dead and gone, dead is permanent. Dead is funerals and wills and people I don’t know.
Nineteen is unbreakable, invincible. Nineteen is the bloody last bite from the meat of your youth and delicious first taste of adulthood’s liqueur. Nineteen lives in a house on Cramer Street, Milwaukee, with a beer pong table and Captain America poster and homemade gravity bong in the corner. Nineteen doesn’t die. It just gets older.
Conner was nineteen and I met him and he was young! And new! And nineteen! And now, I’m crippled, trying to fathom that this person, this peer, has ceased to exist. Found himself submerged in water and fighting for oxygen and losing, losing, letting water fill his lungs finally and accepting this was it, this was the end, and is now dead.
What do you do when a nineteen year old dies? What will Sam and Beans do with his empty room in their house? Do his parents come get his things? Does his presence still linger? Do they rerent the house next year? Do they replace him?
Where will his funeral be? At home, I’m sure; but I bet all his friends are in Milwaukee. How does a mother drop her son off at college and drive down to pick up his corpse? Does he have one?
Mortality seemed like a joke. It seemed distant, a galaxy beyond galaxies. I couldn’t fathom it the same way I couldn’t fathom my tiny place among the heavens. I don’t even believe in heaven, but I can see how people want to. Where’s Conner now? We are in college, we make poor decisions and tweet about them, we live freely and recklessly and carelessly and oh, how artful is that, how artful is not giving a fuck and smoking straight to the filter, and lighting up another? How artful is drinking ourselves into oblivion? How artful is the everyday future conversation we share with dozens upon dozens of people? The first question we ask anyone is “What’s your major?” We ask people what they are going to do with their lives, because college is transitory, college is a stepping stone to different days. From the moment we step onto this campus, we have the intention of living far beyond this. Not a moment do we give the thought that this day could be our last. It’s another day of classes, another day with minimum wage pay to spend on booze, another weekend to relax. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
One day, Conner did not repeat. Death is permanent. More permenant than your a major, your college romance, your future career. Death is it. What now? You’re dead. You can’t change your mind and go a new direction, you can’t experience anymore. You’re one thing, and one thing only. Dead. Past. Gone.
You are now part of history, not the stirring world around you.
You make tears stream from the most casual of acquaintances. You make us mourn for all you could have been. We’ll never know what you would have made of your major, if you’d have children. Did Conner fall in love before he died? Did he die a virgin? Was there a movie he’d been meaning to see? Had he talked to his parents lately?
Death is not artful. There’s no poetry in dying young. It is not to be admired and romanticized and adorned with verbose flourishes of the naive pen. It is not to be passingly considered by the wayward teenage poet in need of inspiration. No. It’s chilling. It’s from nowhere. It’s unbeautiful and plain and appears here, bluntly and rudely, among us.
Death is not imaginary; it is not a concept. Death is non-existence, a rearing fate of us all. Death is around us. It is not reserved for tabloid covers and heart-tearing photographs and news stories and our parents’ parents. Death happens to real people. Fuck it, I’m done with cigarettes. These sidewalks are plagued with duplicitous invincibility. Fuck it, fuck it all. Fuck everything I know. Death is real. Death is real. Death is real.
